I was challenged to answer to this survey by blogger/friend Marta. So here we go:

I. A book that changed my life.My diary.

II. A book I read more than once.Love in the time of cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He is making it ALL UP, it is SO obvious that NO love story can EVER unfold like this. At the same time it’s touching and somehow believable.

III. A book I would like to bring to a deserted island.Probably 100 love sonnets by Pablo Neruda, the pink edition with beautiful and sentimental love poetry in Spanish translated into English on the facing page. Then on my island, I’d learn the Spanish versions daytime by heart, later cry them out into the lonely and very black night and at the same time understand what I was screaming.

IV. A book that made me laugh.A Rough Guide to Sweden. Jeez, it really gives a person some perspective to read travel books on her own country. This handy guide states that Sweden really just needs two days, one in Stockholm and one in Gothenburg…

V. A book that made me cry.All the thick ones, ’cos I have separation anxiety (GWTW/Mitchell, Diva/Fagerholm, Anne of Green Gables/Montgomery, A little love song/Magorian)

VI. A book I wish had been written.A coming of age story taking place in the echoing halls of Uppsala University, some romance at the student clubs called ”nations” and a strong heroine taking her own high road…

VII. A book I wish had not.Little Birds by Anaïs Nin, a sequel to the wonderful and erotic Delta of Venus that has the quality of a, well, sequel.

VIII. A book I am reading now.The American Girl by Monika Fagerholm, a Finnish-Swedish writer who makes up a new language for every book she writes, takes some getting used to, but I think the effects of when you just don’t read a persons story, but read their language is powerful (Ett Öga Rött by Hassan Khemiri had a similar effect).

IX. A book I plan to read.Late in November by Tove Jansson. Aron said it was great and I trust his literary taste.

X. Pass the survey on to other bloggers...I think that Mamma and Nadja should get it once they start their blogs.

AND SOME EXTRA FOR THE CHEAP SEATS IN THE BACK: A book I give to a friend any day.The Daughters of Egalia by Gerd Brantenberg. This is how equal rights should be pursued; in a crazy-witty-fantastic literary description of what life would be like if everything was different. I’m just saying - the scene when Rut gives birth in the spotlight on a stage in the Birth Temple before she leaves to go out to celebrate with her friends! I believe in visualizing the absurd. So does Gerd.

Three years ago, right before the referendum on joining the Euro zone, Sweden's foreign minister Anna Lindh was stabbed to death in a Stockholm department store. I remember Anna Lindh as a fabulous speaker and a political role model and her unnecessary and brutal death as a push to join party politics.

– A human being can be murdered, but ideas can't. Our thanks to you will be to carry your message on, Anna Lindh said at Olof Palme's funeral in 1986.

Today, I am remembering Anna Lindh and on Sunday, I hope people in Sweden remember the ideas of democracy and vote. I will.

Who writes this blog?

Eternal Student - and now also lecturer - from Sweden living in Ghana with my Ghanaian partner, studying migration and what it does to the higher education system in Ghana. This blog is political, positive and sometimes personal.